Our company is looking for a commercial IDE.. rite now we are using Eclipse. Just wondering what are the merits of using a commercial IDE like IntelliJ or Borland IDE.. than using Eclipse ?? Any comments.
Thanks a bunch Sirisha
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Ilja Preuss
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Well, mostly you get the warm feeling of paying for something. You might also get the illusion of being guaranteed to get better support.
Seriously, I do know some people I trust who actually think that IntelliJ IDEA is worth the money. We just got a new coworker who has used it for some years now, and I am eager to hear what he will say when he has used Eclipse for some months.
I don't know any other IDE I'd recommend to buy (although Code Guide looks interesting).
The soul is dyed the color of its thoughts. Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny - it is the light that guides your way. - Heraclitus
Personally I use IntelliJ IDEA 4.5 and it is incredible. Each day I find new cooler things than I had thought. I use ClearCase integration with the IDE and can do all my clearcase needs directly in the IDE which is fantastic. In Eclipse, there is Clearcase integration, but not with all the tools of clearcase. I also found Eclipse to have a higher learning curve than IntelliJ. I found IntelliJ to be more intuitive than Eclipse, in my mind.
I figure anything has to be better than netbeans, their 4.0beta2 release throws exceptions like crazy yet whatever you expected to happen (eg. open a file or somthing) still happens ... reminds me of windows
If you find something affordable and good I'd be very interested in hearing about it.
Chengwei Lee
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Personally speaking, if I've a say in dictating the tools, I'd go for open-source tools such as Eclipse & JBoss instead of commercial stuffs.
They cut down the development costs significantly & you won't be locked to the specific vendor. Imagine you need some features desparately & your vendor tells you they're planning to add those features in the next release... 6 months down the line... the battle would be over by then.
Watch out for JBuilderX - its just not up to the job. It is OK as a modelling tool (though it does have some performance issues), but as an IDE its not a patch on Eclipse. Eclipse with a Together plugin is better.
Less than $500 per developer for IDEA. Well worth the investment, considering your coders sit and stare at this thing all day.
Agreed its well-worth the investment for companies. But as individuals doing freelance projects, I guess open-source is still the cheapest investment.
Jeroen Wenting
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Originally posted by Cheng Wei Lee:
Agreed its well-worth the investment for companies. But as individuals doing freelance projects, I guess open-source is still the cheapest investment.
All depends on what you do.
I've used JBuilder a lot. Decided to purchase it as I found customers without a development environment set up all the time. Saved me enough in increased productivity to be worth the money.
At $500 for IDEA (similar for JBuilder Pro), that's 5 hours or less saved time on a single project to make it worth the investment (considering a fee of $100 an hour and the fact that many projects are fixed-price so in those 5 hours you can do another $500 of project work for that or another customer).
Depending on what type of work you do that might still be the case today (at the time there was no Eclipse and Netbeans was even worse than it is today, and even now Eclipse has poor support for many things even if it's a great editor).
Time IS money for a commercial enterprise, and especially for a consultant or freelancer. That means investing in the tools that give them the highest productivity is not a waste of money.
And as to vendor lockin with JBuilder, that's not an issue. While JBuilder allows you to use custom Borland libraries for some things you are free to use those libs outside JBuilder as long as you have a JBuilder license and JBuilder doesn't force you to use them. All those libs are standard Javabeans after all and Borland has a very good license policy.
Interesting. I used to use a much earlier version of JBuilder (5 I think, or possibly 4) which was perfectly acceptable. JBuilderX is just not good enough. We have (and have had for the past 4 months) outstanding support calls with Borland about problems with integration with VSS; problems generating useful documentation from diagrams; problems with how compilation errors are reported (its paricularaly irritating in a multideveloper environment when a compilation problem in one class is reported in another as an inability to find specified package), plus an unexplained performance issue dealing with large classes.
I know IDE choice is often very much down to personal tase, but IMHO a problem for Borland (and all other commercial IDE vendors) is since JBuilderX is considerably more expensive than Eclipse it should be considerably better as an IDE. Our experience is so far quite the reverse - despite eating up almost three times the memory of eclipse working on the same project, its slower and harder to develop with.
The good points about it are not the traditional core IDE stuff - rather the other products it comes bundled with now: OptimizeIt is useful, Together is good too.
Thomas Andersson
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Originally posted by John Smith: I figure anything has to be better than netbeans, their 4.0beta2 release throws exceptions like crazy yet whatever you expected to happen (eg. open a file or somthing) still happens ... reminds me of windows
Strange...I would strongly recommend Netbeans. I had problems (exceptions) with 4.0 beta1 but since beta2 it runs much smoother. Of course a lot of factors could make a difference. In fact for Java development I would choose Netbeans any day of the week before any other tool (read IDE). (And we are talking about the beta release not the "finished" product)
When working with Eclipse I had a lot of problems with their clearcase integration, which left a sour taste in my mouth. This was some time ago so the problems may have been solved in later releases.
By the way the editor in Netbeans is really, really good...
Zeeshan Samdani
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We've used Netbeans quite extensively and JBuilder but we've found Eclipse to be far better.
...which is just Eclipse. The commercial part is only a plugin. And its not that useful if you are deploying/debugging on WebLogic/JRun/JServer/JBoss/iPlanet etc. [ November 25, 2004: Message edited by: Paul Sturrock ]
David Ulicny
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Right, but there are many commercial plugins which are not available in the Eclipse, for example access to iSeries, WebFacing, Integration Tools etc.
I'm not picking on you here David (honest!) - but I've always been annoyed at how WebSphere Studio purposfully limits which JREs you can use with it. For example the version which comes with WAS 5.0, you cannot run Eclipse with a newer JRE than 1.3.1. because despite the fact that with Eclipse you can swap JRE versions it runs under, when you run it as WebShpere Studio you cannot. Hugely annoying, particularly as what they've done is essentially restrict existing features of Eclipse when they turn it into Studio. You'd think since IBM wrote Eclipse in the first place, the developers would have known better!
David Ulicny
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I never tried to switch JRE in WebSphere , but in Eclipse I'm using this feature, it's really cool to test the code on different JVM. You will find the performance differencies between Sun and IBM JVM
Chengwei Lee
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Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting: I've used JBuilder a lot. Decided to purchase it as I found customers without a development environment set up all the time. Saved me enough in increased productivity to be worth the money.
And as to vendor lockin with JBuilder, that's not an issue. While JBuilder allows you to use custom Borland libraries for some things you are free to use those libs outside JBuilder as long as you have a JBuilder license and JBuilder doesn't force you to use them. All those libs are standard Javabeans after all and Borland has a very good license policy.
I'm using JB9 at work now, playing with Eclipse at home. Pricing aside, I'd say JB9 requires more minimum hardware requirements as compared with Eclipse. I'm using a Dell laptop with P4, 1.7Ghz & 512 MB ram and it seems that JB9 takes rather a long time to startup & ocassionally it freezes while I'm coding (pretty annoying especially when I'm in a hurry).
I guess its a matter of personal preferences. One man's meat may be another's poison.
Interesting that despite Borlands purchase of TogetherSoft and getting their ControlCenter tool, it sounds like they have done nothing particular with it. If JbuilderX modeling is weak this must be so. It was a rumor that Borland only took over TogetherSoft as they had a better product
Eclipse would get my vote, but I also use vi sometimes - [old habits die hard!]
Originally posted by Pavel Kubal: David: can you specify WHY is WS the best IDE?
Corporate policy dictates that anything produced by IBM is automatically the best on the market. I thought you knew that
Jeroen Wenting
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Originally posted by Cheng Wei Lee:
I'm using JB9 at work now, playing with Eclipse at home. Pricing aside, I'd say JB9 requires more minimum hardware requirements as compared with Eclipse. I'm using a Dell laptop with P4, 1.7Ghz & 512 MB ram and it seems that JB9 takes rather a long time to startup & ocassionally it freezes while I'm coding (pretty annoying especially when I'm in a hurry).
hmm, that's my experience with Eclipse (as well as with NB4) on a P4 2.4 with 256MB RAM. Haven't tried JB9, might try JBX some day to see how it performs.
I guess its a matter of personal preferences. One man's meat may be another's poison.
Very true. Though there's few editors I won't touch and most of those are no longer current so getting less and less likely to be encountered in the wild.
Jeroen Wenting
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To continue, I downloaded JB2005 Foundation yesterday and I'm in heaven. So much more responsive than Eclipse 3 or Netbeans, no more screen locking up for up to a minute every 5 minutes or so.
I'm seriously considering buying the upgrade version of JB2005 Developer to get the JSP editor which is the only thing I really miss in the free version (I now use VIM for editing JSPs).
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